Clearly Google should get into a less risky business, like laundering money for drug cartels, if they are facing potential penalties of that magnitude...
I think people labor under the delusion that 'health' is some sort of idyllic state of bodily perfection, rather than the state where most of the potentially catastrophic pathogens, precancerous cells, and who knows what else are being held in enough of a stalemate that something else will probably kill you first.
In the totally contra-factual world where your body exists in edenic good health until malign external influences crop up, tamping down a dangerous-but-effective system seems like a much better idea.
Oh, it's an egregiously sloppy law, leaving the power of selective enforcement right in the hands of people who really shouldn't be trusted with safety scissors, much less discretionary state force; but that's part of why I'm skeptical that this exercise in analog production is 'legal'. No way is the multinational-supply-chain-chemical-industry going to approve of meddling DEA agents getting in the way of business, so it's probably pretty low risk; but it would take some serious doing to come up with a psychoactive variant of a banned substance that doesn't fall within scope, if somebody notices.
I'm not saying that it would necessarily be trivial; just that they don't have much choice. As of a few minutes ago, when I checked, I could get an Xbox360 (250GB HDD, 1 controller, Halo 4, and Tomb Raider) for $250 or the nasty cut-down 4GB-of-flash version for $200. All with the advantage of a large, guaranteed (and typically available used for peanuts, since it's a last-gen system) game library.
Unless Amazon is seriously stealth-launching a tier 1 console, without so much as a ripple from the various studios and devs who they'd need to build games for such a beast, they'll be laughed out of the market if they try something at the same price as an incumbent console.
Obviously enforcement of every bespoke chemical being synthesized to order is impractical even by the standards of the drug wars; but are substances such as the one described in the article actually 'legal'? My (admittedly layman's) understanding of the Federal Analog Act was that it was a fairly blatant blanket ban on 'absolutely anything that looks like something illegal and has some recreational potential'. A rather expansive law; but one that you can't just wiggle past on a technicality (though, obviously, you can wiggle past on sheer logistical impracticality; but so can ~40 billion dollars worth of cocaine, so that isn't really a legality test...)
Between the state of CPUs you can buy and the presence of a massive supply of used and new-old-stock last gen consoles, $300 seems like about the weirdest place to postulate an unconventional console launch.
Once you cut the expensive multitouch IPS panel and battery out of the equation, you'd be hard pressed to spend $300 on a 'mobile' derived system. The SoCs just don't cost that much, and they are extremely heavily integrated because they are supposed to go in phones and tablets and things. Something like the Ouya, and the absurd number of more or less anonymous Android HDMI sticks from the pacific rim cut things a little close to come in under $100; but an extra $50-$100 still leaves you at or below $200, and gives you a great deal of room for improvement. At the same time, $300 is a hard target to hit with 'full PC' derived systems, unless they've had several generations of cost reduction (as we can see from MS and Sony and how long it took them to break even at that price point, after they eventually cut down to it). It's just an odd number.
If Amazon wants a 'Kindle Couch', $300 is silly high, given the very very strong odds that it would be a screenless or screen-reduced variant on a relatively cheap mobile design. If the rumor alleges that Amazon is gunning for the AAA console space, months after the two main players and the hapless runner up have already played, that just strains credulity.
In your death-of-SPARC scenario, where are you putting your bet: will SPARC take Solaris with it, or will they just stop treating the x86-64 port like a bastard child and keep right on selling it on Xeon/Opteron boxes instead?
Given the amount of (admittedly still primitive; but advancing) work on interfacing with the ear that they've done for the sake of the deaf, would it be too radical to propose surgical modification of astronauts to help them cope with imperfectly simulated gravity?
You'd still need some sort of centrifuge, to stave off all the muscular and skeletal side effects of zero G; but tampering with the inner ear to prevent the subject noticing the various imperfections associated with a fairly small centrifuge might well become doable with small computerized implants in the relatively near future...
Typing on a touch screen SUCKS, why do people buy these things?
Space constraints. With a touchscreen, your typing sucks; but you recover all the keyboard space for viewing whenever you aren't typing. If you want a hard keyboard, you either chop the bottom third of the screen, or add nontrivial thickness and mechanical complexity for a folding or sliding keyboard.
Damned if I can understand the freak kids who seem to enjoy typing with their thumbs on a featureless pane of glass; but it isn't really hard to see why screens larger than the classic blackberry layout allowed have taken over, given that using tiny screens is also pretty miserable.
Even if Samsung did something blatantly actionable (wherever that point lies, 'look and feel' lawsuits seem a bit subjective), it would be interesting to see if Microsoft did anything about it. They certainly aren't shy about lawsuits in general; but they might actually be pleased to see a major Android OEM spitting out some non-Android devices that might help fragment the non-WinPhone market (both by adding another OS to the mix, and by likely encouraging Samsung to cultivate a variety of APIs and services that devs can use on any Samsung device, Android or Tizen, with a little abstraction; but not on other manufacturer's takes on those OSes)...
There's no general-case connection; but this is Samsung we are talking about here, so it's pretty safe to assume that anything they added will be about as classy as the bloatware on a Best Buy HP-Compaq at the bottom of the price range...
If we are lucky, the BSP side might not be a total failure; but Samsung makes a hell of a mess when they try app development, at least on their android devices.
I suspect that the bigger problem is all those applications that are mostly just IIS/SQL Server/.NET; but have enough native binaries in assorted places to gum up the works. Not so much of an issue for fancy hyperscale web outfits that have total control over their server stack and software; but a lot of businesses depend on 3rd party software, often with a long upgrade cycle, and all it takes is a few x86 specific components to scotch the whole thing until the vendor fixes it and charges a large pile of money for the update.
I have no love for Android; but there is one major difference between Intel's latest and assorted ARM:
Has Intel managed to cram some impressive x86 punch into ever lower power envelopes? Yes, yes indeed. Are they the only game in town, period, if you want reasonably speedy x86s at low power? Yes, unfortunately so. And, to the degree that the threat from iPads and the like doesn't keep them in check, prices reflect that.
ARM, by contrast, lacks some punch and a lot of legacy software; but approximately a zillion vendors using undistinguished foundry processes can achieve decent results at low power. Prices reflect this.
So long as ARM remains a looming threat, Intel will price their parts such that they (by virtue of Intel's unquestioned technical prowess) are very, very, compelling. If ARM shows any signs of weakness, it'll be back to the early Pentium M days, when Intel pretended that the 'Pentium 4 Mobile' was good enough, and that a Pentium M deserved a massive price premium. Not fun, at all.
I swear we all should hate Oracle more than MS or any other company out there. They are the next trolls of the IT industry since SCO lost.
On the plus side, Oracle shows signs of being stupid evil, which is a self-correcting problem in the long run. It's pragmatic evil that you really have to worry about.
Seriously, will Oracle make some additional money by freezing out 3rd party support minions? Sure, at least in the short term. Does a proprietary big-iron UNIX need a reputation for help being hard to find and expensive(more than it already has)? Like an extra hole in the head... If you want to sell expensive software and hardware, you either need to offer unbelievable ROI or commodify the hell out of everything you don't sell that your customer will also need. MS did it with MCSEs, Apple did it with 'apps', IBM supports Linux more or less entirely for this reason.
Unless you feel damn lucky about the value of your product, such that you think people are willing to pay through the nose for it, trying to squeeze the customer in areas that aren't your core expertise is a short term gain that cuts your own throat. If you are really that good at selling support, you probably don't need to squelch your competitors by other means. If you aren't, can you be assured that your customers will continue to put up with buying expensive hardware and software, only to deal with getting support only from you, for a pretty penny? Not a good long-term bet.
I've heard considerable... controversy... surrounding that disposal method. You've got a very curious situation where a material either has to be treated as (low level) hazmat or can be declared delicious, healthful, fertilizer, and spread over agricultural land. Verdicts tend to vary from 'environmentally sustainable reuse!' to 'You don't fucking mean that we provide legislative incentives to build waste dumps with absolutely no containment on top of active farmland?'.
(In one particularly, um, polarizing, case the department of Housing and Urban Development funded a study (sorry about the paywall, fuck Elsevier) on some convenient poor urban neighborhoods to see if healthful biosolids could reduce lead uptake by the residents. Accounts... vary sharply... as to how much the study population was told about what exactly was being done. There have been a number of similar studies, mostly on similarly poor and black neighborhoods, which has raised some questions about whether the study sites were chosen in part for ignorant powerlessness. To my knowledge, no followup data are available on the health effects of those studies, positive or negative.)
Why do we need such powerful military grade drones just to keep tabs on illegal aliens crossing our borders? A bunch of cheap quadcopters with infrared and other cameras could do the job.
You wouldn't want General Atomics to think that their stock price is dependent on keeping us involved in shithole sand-traps, would you?
The annoying thing about 'Peak phosphorus', whenever you think it will actually occur, is that the stuff is drop-dead, full-stop, Not. Replaceable. for biological purposes(barring some seriously radical synthetic biology that makes no use of ATP, among other things). Oil is an absurdly convenient all-in-one energy source and chemical feedstock; but there are plenty of other energy sources and chemical feedstocks, albeit generally more inconvenient and/or expensive in some way. Phosphorus, though, is do or die for life as we know it.
The history of 'biosolids' (seriously, that's the PR-speak phrase for composted sewage solids) as fertilizer is a bit mixed.
Assuming you don't fuck up the composting (not always a safe assumption, once the system moves into volume production and management by people who have to make budget) the stuff is largely pathogen free; but that doesn't do anything about anything that microorganisms that thrive on sewage don't help you with. Heavy metals, some drugs, some hormones(synthetic or not), some endocrine disruptors, any random plastics that end up down the sink, and so on. The concentrations aren't apocalyptic; but if you plan on routine use as fertilizer, better hope that they don't build up in the soil...
So called 'class B' sludge, where they don't even bother treating for pathogens, is of course even more fun than 'class A' where you only have to worry about anything that bacteria won't eat.
I'd go with 'a bit of both' when it comes to steel. The list of biological systems containing iron is not a short one; but a massive amount of iron occupies the vital niche of "being a reddish oxide in dirt". I hate to get teleology in my nice clean biology; but I think it's fair to say that iron is only the limiting factor in certain very specific niches (there are some areas of ocean that will algae bloom like crazy if you provide them with iron, so obviously they aren't getting as much as they want), while most ecosystems just can't be bothered to suck any more out of the ground, despite it being there.
" "Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?" enquired Lenina.
"Phosphorus recovery," explained Henry telegraphically. "On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P2O5 used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England alone." Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. "Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow."
Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly downwards at the monorail station. "Fine," she agreed. "But queer that Alphas and Betas won't make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there."
"All men are physico-chemically equal," said Henry sententiously."
" The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud–reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers' first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl–it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! "That old fellow," he said, "he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly." The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
"Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away:
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies "
when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn't want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but "sweet mother" (in the Savage's tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face–quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer. "
-Brave New World
The recognition that running out of phosphorus is serious shit isn't even all that new.
The PRL isn't the firmware itself, it's a configuration file that instructs the firmware what towers to use (and a suitably paranoid OSS firmware would presumably at least tell you about the PRL push, and ideally apply heuristics to warn you about salient details, like "Hey, you just got a PRL push, and the PRL includes a tower that didn't exist at all last week. Isn't that interesting?", in sort of the same way that various SSL bandaid techniques try to warn you about SSL certs changing when they shouldn't). It is a good example, though, of the degree to which the cell system is build around trusting the network, as well as the rather dangerous things you can do without even qualifying as an 'exploit', though researchers say that cell basebands are held together largely by obscurity, spit, and duct tape, so exploits can't be safely ruled out.
A trusted firmware would be an improvement; but I'm personally a bit skeptical about anything being enough to safely interact with a cell network. The connection between subscriber ID (at least at the level of 'SIM with ID XYZ', the degree to which that correlates to a human varies by jurisdiction), location (at least at the level of tower triangulation, possibly E911-compliant, or GPS provided), and latency-sensitive network activity (difficult to route over TOR) is a lot of strikes against it. With untrusted firmware and dubious OSes, it's a total loss; but it's a dangerous game in the best of cases.
I suspect that (particularly when dealing with foreign subjects; but in general because they don't have many field agents) the NSA prefers full-featured rootkits; but agencies with more boots and fewer nerds are known to have taken advantage of the weaknesses of cellular firmware.
In this case, for instance, (atypically well documented, because of the court spat; but probably also occurs more quietly elsewhere), the FBI set up a stingray, then had verizon do a silent PRL push that reconfigured the target's cell modem to switch over to the stingray as its preferred tower. That isn't even an 'exploit', in the sense that PRLs are supposed to be able to do that, and carriers are supposed to be able to push them, and it still adds up to a fairly hairy security problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly Google should get into a less risky business, like laundering money for drug cartels, if they are facing potential penalties of that magnitude...
I think people labor under the delusion that 'health' is some sort of idyllic state of bodily perfection, rather than the state where most of the potentially catastrophic pathogens, precancerous cells, and who knows what else are being held in enough of a stalemate that something else will probably kill you first.
In the totally contra-factual world where your body exists in edenic good health until malign external influences crop up, tamping down a dangerous-but-effective system seems like a much better idea.
Oh, it's an egregiously sloppy law, leaving the power of selective enforcement right in the hands of people who really shouldn't be trusted with safety scissors, much less discretionary state force; but that's part of why I'm skeptical that this exercise in analog production is 'legal'. No way is the multinational-supply-chain-chemical-industry going to approve of meddling DEA agents getting in the way of business, so it's probably pretty low risk; but it would take some serious doing to come up with a psychoactive variant of a banned substance that doesn't fall within scope, if somebody notices.
I'm not saying that it would necessarily be trivial; just that they don't have much choice. As of a few minutes ago, when I checked, I could get an Xbox360 (250GB HDD, 1 controller, Halo 4, and Tomb Raider) for $250 or the nasty cut-down 4GB-of-flash version for $200. All with the advantage of a large, guaranteed (and typically available used for peanuts, since it's a last-gen system) game library.
Unless Amazon is seriously stealth-launching a tier 1 console, without so much as a ripple from the various studios and devs who they'd need to build games for such a beast, they'll be laughed out of the market if they try something at the same price as an incumbent console.
Obviously enforcement of every bespoke chemical being synthesized to order is impractical even by the standards of the drug wars; but are substances such as the one described in the article actually 'legal'? My (admittedly layman's) understanding of the Federal Analog Act was that it was a fairly blatant blanket ban on 'absolutely anything that looks like something illegal and has some recreational potential'. A rather expansive law; but one that you can't just wiggle past on a technicality (though, obviously, you can wiggle past on sheer logistical impracticality; but so can ~40 billion dollars worth of cocaine, so that isn't really a legality test...)
Between the state of CPUs you can buy and the presence of a massive supply of used and new-old-stock last gen consoles, $300 seems like about the weirdest place to postulate an unconventional console launch.
Once you cut the expensive multitouch IPS panel and battery out of the equation, you'd be hard pressed to spend $300 on a 'mobile' derived system. The SoCs just don't cost that much, and they are extremely heavily integrated because they are supposed to go in phones and tablets and things. Something like the Ouya, and the absurd number of more or less anonymous Android HDMI sticks from the pacific rim cut things a little close to come in under $100; but an extra $50-$100 still leaves you at or below $200, and gives you a great deal of room for improvement. At the same time, $300 is a hard target to hit with 'full PC' derived systems, unless they've had several generations of cost reduction (as we can see from MS and Sony and how long it took them to break even at that price point, after they eventually cut down to it). It's just an odd number.
If Amazon wants a 'Kindle Couch', $300 is silly high, given the very very strong odds that it would be a screenless or screen-reduced variant on a relatively cheap mobile design. If the rumor alleges that Amazon is gunning for the AAA console space, months after the two main players and the hapless runner up have already played, that just strains credulity.
In your death-of-SPARC scenario, where are you putting your bet: will SPARC take Solaris with it, or will they just stop treating the x86-64 port like a bastard child and keep right on selling it on Xeon/Opteron boxes instead?
Given the amount of (admittedly still primitive; but advancing) work on interfacing with the ear that they've done for the sake of the deaf, would it be too radical to propose surgical modification of astronauts to help them cope with imperfectly simulated gravity?
You'd still need some sort of centrifuge, to stave off all the muscular and skeletal side effects of zero G; but tampering with the inner ear to prevent the subject noticing the various imperfections associated with a fairly small centrifuge might well become doable with small computerized implants in the relatively near future...
Typing on a touch screen SUCKS, why do people buy these things?
Space constraints. With a touchscreen, your typing sucks; but you recover all the keyboard space for viewing whenever you aren't typing. If you want a hard keyboard, you either chop the bottom third of the screen, or add nontrivial thickness and mechanical complexity for a folding or sliding keyboard.
Damned if I can understand the freak kids who seem to enjoy typing with their thumbs on a featureless pane of glass; but it isn't really hard to see why screens larger than the classic blackberry layout allowed have taken over, given that using tiny screens is also pretty miserable.
Even if Samsung did something blatantly actionable (wherever that point lies, 'look and feel' lawsuits seem a bit subjective), it would be interesting to see if Microsoft did anything about it. They certainly aren't shy about lawsuits in general; but they might actually be pleased to see a major Android OEM spitting out some non-Android devices that might help fragment the non-WinPhone market (both by adding another OS to the mix, and by likely encouraging Samsung to cultivate a variety of APIs and services that devs can use on any Samsung device, Android or Tizen, with a little abstraction; but not on other manufacturer's takes on those OSes)...
It doesn't rule it out either...
There's no general-case connection; but this is Samsung we are talking about here, so it's pretty safe to assume that anything they added will be about as classy as the bloatware on a Best Buy HP-Compaq at the bottom of the price range...
If we are lucky, the BSP side might not be a total failure; but Samsung makes a hell of a mess when they try app development, at least on their android devices.
I suspect that the bigger problem is all those applications that are mostly just IIS/SQL Server/.NET; but have enough native binaries in assorted places to gum up the works. Not so much of an issue for fancy hyperscale web outfits that have total control over their server stack and software; but a lot of businesses depend on 3rd party software, often with a long upgrade cycle, and all it takes is a few x86 specific components to scotch the whole thing until the vendor fixes it and charges a large pile of money for the update.
I have no love for Android; but there is one major difference between Intel's latest and assorted ARM:
Has Intel managed to cram some impressive x86 punch into ever lower power envelopes? Yes, yes indeed. Are they the only game in town, period, if you want reasonably speedy x86s at low power? Yes, unfortunately so. And, to the degree that the threat from iPads and the like doesn't keep them in check, prices reflect that.
ARM, by contrast, lacks some punch and a lot of legacy software; but approximately a zillion vendors using undistinguished foundry processes can achieve decent results at low power. Prices reflect this.
So long as ARM remains a looming threat, Intel will price their parts such that they (by virtue of Intel's unquestioned technical prowess) are very, very, compelling. If ARM shows any signs of weakness, it'll be back to the early Pentium M days, when Intel pretended that the 'Pentium 4 Mobile' was good enough, and that a Pentium M deserved a massive price premium. Not fun, at all.
Write once, debug in some places, abandon all hope elsewhere...
I swear we all should hate Oracle more than MS or any other company out there. They are the next trolls of the IT industry since SCO lost.
On the plus side, Oracle shows signs of being stupid evil, which is a self-correcting problem in the long run. It's pragmatic evil that you really have to worry about.
Seriously, will Oracle make some additional money by freezing out 3rd party support minions? Sure, at least in the short term. Does a proprietary big-iron UNIX need a reputation for help being hard to find and expensive(more than it already has)? Like an extra hole in the head... If you want to sell expensive software and hardware, you either need to offer unbelievable ROI or commodify the hell out of everything you don't sell that your customer will also need. MS did it with MCSEs, Apple did it with 'apps', IBM supports Linux more or less entirely for this reason.
Unless you feel damn lucky about the value of your product, such that you think people are willing to pay through the nose for it, trying to squeeze the customer in areas that aren't your core expertise is a short term gain that cuts your own throat. If you are really that good at selling support, you probably don't need to squelch your competitors by other means. If you aren't, can you be assured that your customers will continue to put up with buying expensive hardware and software, only to deal with getting support only from you, for a pretty penny? Not a good long-term bet.
I've heard considerable... controversy... surrounding that disposal method. You've got a very curious situation where a material either has to be treated as (low level) hazmat or can be declared delicious, healthful, fertilizer, and spread over agricultural land. Verdicts tend to vary from 'environmentally sustainable reuse!' to 'You don't fucking mean that we provide legislative incentives to build waste dumps with absolutely no containment on top of active farmland?'.
(In one particularly, um, polarizing, case the department of Housing and Urban Development funded a study (sorry about the paywall, fuck Elsevier) on some convenient poor urban neighborhoods to see if healthful biosolids could reduce lead uptake by the residents. Accounts... vary sharply... as to how much the study population was told about what exactly was being done. There have been a number of similar studies, mostly on similarly poor and black neighborhoods, which has raised some questions about whether the study sites were chosen in part for ignorant powerlessness. To my knowledge, no followup data are available on the health effects of those studies, positive or negative.)
Isn't an 'anti-drone drone' called a 'surface to air missile'?
Why do we need such powerful military grade drones just to keep tabs on illegal aliens crossing our borders? A bunch of cheap quadcopters with infrared and other cameras could do the job.
You wouldn't want General Atomics to think that their stock price is dependent on keeping us involved in shithole sand-traps, would you?
Do you think that the border patrol would risk a turf war with the CIA?
Narco territory battles can get ugly...
The annoying thing about 'Peak phosphorus', whenever you think it will actually occur, is that the stuff is drop-dead, full-stop, Not. Replaceable. for biological purposes(barring some seriously radical synthetic biology that makes no use of ATP, among other things). Oil is an absurdly convenient all-in-one energy source and chemical feedstock; but there are plenty of other energy sources and chemical feedstocks, albeit generally more inconvenient and/or expensive in some way. Phosphorus, though, is do or die for life as we know it.
The history of 'biosolids' (seriously, that's the PR-speak phrase for composted sewage solids) as fertilizer is a bit mixed.
Assuming you don't fuck up the composting (not always a safe assumption, once the system moves into volume production and management by people who have to make budget) the stuff is largely pathogen free; but that doesn't do anything about anything that microorganisms that thrive on sewage don't help you with. Heavy metals, some drugs, some hormones(synthetic or not), some endocrine disruptors, any random plastics that end up down the sink, and so on. The concentrations aren't apocalyptic; but if you plan on routine use as fertilizer, better hope that they don't build up in the soil...
So called 'class B' sludge, where they don't even bother treating for pathogens, is of course even more fun than 'class A' where you only have to worry about anything that bacteria won't eat.
I'd go with 'a bit of both' when it comes to steel. The list of biological systems containing iron is not a short one; but a massive amount of iron occupies the vital niche of "being a reddish oxide in dirt". I hate to get teleology in my nice clean biology; but I think it's fair to say that iron is only the limiting factor in certain very specific niches (there are some areas of ocean that will algae bloom like crazy if you provide them with iron, so obviously they aren't getting as much as they want), while most ecosystems just can't be bothered to suck any more out of the ground, despite it being there.
" "Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?" enquired Lenina. "Phosphorus recovery," explained Henry telegraphically. "On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P2O5 used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England alone." Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. "Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow." Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly downwards at the monorail station. "Fine," she agreed. "But queer that Alphas and Betas won't make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there." "All men are physico-chemically equal," said Henry sententiously."
" The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud–reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers' first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl–it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! "That old fellow," he said, "he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly." The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
"Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, That sees into the bottom of my grief? O sweet my mother, cast me not away: Delay this marriage for a month, a week; Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies "
when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn't want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but "sweet mother" (in the Savage's tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face–quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer. "
-Brave New World
The recognition that running out of phosphorus is serious shit isn't even all that new.
The PRL isn't the firmware itself, it's a configuration file that instructs the firmware what towers to use (and a suitably paranoid OSS firmware would presumably at least tell you about the PRL push, and ideally apply heuristics to warn you about salient details, like "Hey, you just got a PRL push, and the PRL includes a tower that didn't exist at all last week. Isn't that interesting?", in sort of the same way that various SSL bandaid techniques try to warn you about SSL certs changing when they shouldn't). It is a good example, though, of the degree to which the cell system is build around trusting the network, as well as the rather dangerous things you can do without even qualifying as an 'exploit', though researchers say that cell basebands are held together largely by obscurity, spit, and duct tape, so exploits can't be safely ruled out.
A trusted firmware would be an improvement; but I'm personally a bit skeptical about anything being enough to safely interact with a cell network. The connection between subscriber ID (at least at the level of 'SIM with ID XYZ', the degree to which that correlates to a human varies by jurisdiction), location (at least at the level of tower triangulation, possibly E911-compliant, or GPS provided), and latency-sensitive network activity (difficult to route over TOR) is a lot of strikes against it. With untrusted firmware and dubious OSes, it's a total loss; but it's a dangerous game in the best of cases.
I suspect that (particularly when dealing with foreign subjects; but in general because they don't have many field agents) the NSA prefers full-featured rootkits; but agencies with more boots and fewer nerds are known to have taken advantage of the weaknesses of cellular firmware.
In this case, for instance, (atypically well documented, because of the court spat; but probably also occurs more quietly elsewhere), the FBI set up a stingray, then had verizon do a silent PRL push that reconfigured the target's cell modem to switch over to the stingray as its preferred tower. That isn't even an 'exploit', in the sense that PRLs are supposed to be able to do that, and carriers are supposed to be able to push them, and it still adds up to a fairly hairy security problem.